How to deal with Dwarf Fortress’ damp stone and aquifers

Dwarf Fortress’ Aquifers can be described as underground layers of stone or soil that contain water. The first place you’ll run into them is while trying to select an embark location. The perfect location to embark in Dwarf FortressCan set you up to succeed or (immediately) fail.

Our other guides advised that you avoid flooding your fortresses with water. The availability of fortresses is greatly limited if you avoid aquifers.

The good news is that aquifers aren’t too hard to deal with, as long as you know what to do. With a little knowledge and planning, building in an aquifer even has benefits — like a secure and indoor source of fresh water.

You can find this article here Dwarf Fortress aquifer guide, we’ll explain what aquifers are and then tell you how to deal with them.

Damp Stone

When your dwarfs dig into the earth they may encounter soil or stones. You’ll get an alert in the upper left, and any digging jobs that cross that damp stone will be cancelled — meaning you’ll have to re-designate those blocks for mining. The default setting will cause your game to pause until you resolve the issue.

Photo: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games by Polygon

A damp stone alert just means that there’s water saturating the block your dwarves have just exposed — either there’s water above it (like a pond or a river) or it’s an aquifer. You can check the block to determine which one it is.

You’ll be able to see where the damp stone is located any time you open the Mining menu (m). A saturated block will have a water droplet icon over it, but only when you’re mining.

Inquifers Dwarf Fortress

If you expose an existing aquifer block it will produce water on all nearby blocks. Aquifers generate water orthogonally — to the north, south, east, or west only — from the source block.

Light versus heavy aquifers

It is how quickly they produce water that makes the difference between heavy and light aquifers. The time it takes for light aquifers to produce water is in game weeks or months. Heavy aquifers, on the other hand, generate water each in-game second (basically immediately).

Resorbing water

Aquifers can also be used to absorb water. Functionally, what that means is that an aquifer layer will never flood the layer above it — it will never generate more than a 7/7 water depth. Hit f to see a numerical indicator of water depth.

The same holds true if water comes in from the above. Even if there are multiple levels to an aquifer, this means that water generated by an aquifer is only one block deep.

Management of aquifers

You have several options to stop flooding after you expose the aquifer. The first two are permanent and easy to build (building walls and smoothing stones), while the second one, building screw pumps (or constructing screws pumps), is more laborious and temporary. The basic idea behind building a pump lets you drain enough water so that it can be used for any of the other options.

The Construction of Walls

Only naturally generated blocks in an aquifer create water, so a constructed block — like a wall — is safe. Dig an extra block around whatever you’re mining through an aquifer and replace the edges with walls.

Construction can only take place on blocks with less than 2/7 water, so you’ll have to be quick about it. The f key can be used to determine how deep water is numerically. If the water gets too deep, you’ll need to build a Screw Pump (below).

Smoothing

If the aquifer is in a stone layer — not a sand, clay, loam, or silt layer — you can instead choose to Smooth the walls (and the floor if you want) with v. Select Smoothing with m and highlight the walls. The smoothing of stone walls will prevent them from producing water.

It is important to remember that smoothing soil does not work. On those levels, you’ll have to stick to building walls.

Screw pumps

The Water Pump pumps water up from one block to two blocks ahead. You decide the direction of flow when building it.

Placing the Screw Pump can be tricky. It is important to ensure that the source block of the screw pump does not touch it. ChannelTo access water at the lower level, remove a block.

At the front end of the pump, make sure there are walls — either natural or constructed — blocking the water from flowing back.

Sources: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games via Polygon| Sources: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games via Polygon

Once you have your location set up, go to Build (b) > Machines/Fluids (m) > Screw Pump (p) to build one. A few items are required for screw pumps: block (either a wooden block from a Carpenter Workshop or a rock block from a Stonemason’s Workshop), one Large corkscrew (either a wooden one from a Carpenter’s workshop or a metal one from a Metalsmith), and a Pipe section (either a wooden one from a Carpenter’s workshop or a metal one from a Metalsmith).

After a pump has been built you can switch it on by clicking the button and looking at the box. You can start the pump manually. (It’s also possible to power a pump with a Windmill or Waterwheel, but that’s a lot more work.)

Although pumps will not lower the source block to below one-seventh of the water level, it is best to drain them long enough to make a wall or smooth out the stone.

Aquifers:

If you’re ready (and willing) to deal with them, aquifers can be a secure, convenient, and relatively safe source of drinking water for your fortress. Simply dig a hole in the ground and let it fill up with water. Either mark that as your water source or, if you’re feeling fancy, build a well above it.